I. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to computerized planning systems and methods, and to such systems and methods for planning demand for products, such as complex or configurable products having at least one product dependent characteristic and one product independent characteristic. More particularly, the invention relates to planning systems and methods for planning demand for a configurable product in a managed supply chain.
II. Background Information
Demand planning is used to forecast the demand for products. The object of demand planning is to plan the demand of complex or configurable products and their components to obtain values for the product's characteristics. A complex or configurable product is a product having at least one product dependent characteristic, for example, computer memory, configuration, hard disc, etc, and at least one product independent characteristic, for example, sales regions, customer channel and location, etc. In order to plan the demand of complex products and their components, it is desirable that the product independent characteristics can be planned consistently, i.e., adding up the values for all the values of one product independent characteristic gives the same sum for each characteristic. For example, if the total of all sales regions is changed, it is desirable that this change leads to an identical change of the total of all the customer channels, for example.
However, in order to model the bill of material, that is the list of material necessary to make a product, for complex products, the product dependent characteristics, generally, require a modified consistency condition. One such consistency condition is provided, for example, by an enhanced consistency condition. Such an enhanced consistency condition logic allows that the sum of the values for a product dependent characteristic deviates from the sum for the other characteristics so that, for example, the numbers of hard discs can be larger than the number of computers because some computers have more than one hard disc. Nevertheless, there is still a link between the finished product and its components, so that raising the number of computers planned raises the number of hard discs proportionally.
It has been found that conventional demand planning incorporating conventional enhanced consistency logic suffers from one or more drawbacks. One problem is that conventional enhanced consistency logic cannot be used together with the product independent characteristics. A further problem of conventional enhanced consistency logic is that it cannot be used for the demand planning of an aggregate of more than one product. This severely limits the applicability of this logic, because for a large number of products, which is the usual scenario for a manufacturer of complex products, it is not feasible to work on one product at a time, which conventional enhanced consistency condition requires.
These and other problems of conventional approaches compromise the accuracy of the demand planning.
In view of the foregoing, it is an object of the present invention to address these and/or other problems encountered in conventional demand planning incorporating a consistency function.